ending 18 June 2000
CULTURE OVERLOAD
London's new footbridge over the Thames suffered the curse of all millennium projects when it had to be closed within hours as it swayed alarmingly. The bridge is only the latest millennium project to go badly, following the late erection of the 'London Eye' and the loss- making Millennium Dome. Across the country millennium projects have reported difficulties as art centres and museums fail to attract the support hoped for.
A new report from the Design Agenda group Great Expectations: The culture industries in the New Economy explains that the government has invested bizarre ambitions in the arts. New Labour advisors like Charles Leadbeater hope that 'cultural entrepreneurs can play a critical role in promoting social cohesion and a sense of belonging'. But as the Design Agenda report shows, the great expectations that the government invested in the creative industries to transform Britain's public life and economy are unlikely to be fulfilled. Since New Labour came to power British cinema has fallen further into the red, along with British television.
Thanks to the government's lottery funding, the supply of galleries and art centres is exceeding demand. The Office of National Statistics guestimate of Museum attendance in 1998-99 of 81 million was drastically reduced by the Museums and Galleries Commission to 65 million. On top of the excess of 'heritage' centres from the Conservative eighties, now we have a superfluity of mediocre 'people's museums' like the ill-attended Sheffield Museum of Popular music. The best of culture is unlikely to survive the government's support.
Great Expectations: The culture industries in the New Economy is available from Design Agenda, 4.27 The Beaux Arts Building, 10-18 Manor Gardens, London, N7 6JT, price £7.50 plus £1 p&p.
KICKING AGAINST THE PRICKS
Last week, leading Section 28 supporter, Cardinal Winning wrote in the Spectator that homosexuality could never make people happy because it is 'a lifestyle that can never respond to the deepest longings of the human heart'. Sir Elton John demanded to know on what 'practical' experience did the presumably celibate priest draw this conclusion?
Sir Elton's criticism is defensive. When it comes to a competition of lifestyles there is no reason why homosexuality should accept second place and one reason why it can claim pre-eminence. The charmless cardinal still believes that God made man, so unsurprisingly he has failed to notice God's demise. With no heaven to hang on for, self- realisation is the new faith. The incitement of our desire for personal satisfaction is its unholy spirit. Profane sexuality has replaced matrimony as a harness for the pleasures of the flesh. The reality that lifelong heterosexual monogamy is now just one alternative 'lifestyle' among many is betrayed in the wording of Section 28 itself.
In the past, homosexuality was condemned precisely because it represented the indulgence of desire for its own sake. But today consume, consume is the law and the prophets. Even children have become a field for their parents' personal fulfilment. This awful shallowness is our low-cal hellfire, and new priests have appeared in the land to save us from it. The greens, for example, with their eco-friendly vision of earthly delight, and gays too, with a claim to superior experience in the vicissitudes of sexuality, leading to emotional 'awareness' and safer sex practices - the brotherhood of fucking and shopping.
The cardinal may have something when he says that lifestyles are an inadequate response to the deepest longings of the human heart. But the old bigot kicks against the pricks. The 'family' he wants to promote is a lie. No doubt he will get some half-hearted plug for it in the government's replacement for Section 28 but Winning is losing the turf war.
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Following the publication of the seminal essays in History and Class Consciousness in 1923, the Hungarian revolutionary Georg Lukacs was witch-hunted by Stalin's literary henchmen for his 'left deviation'. Until now, Lukacs' only recorded response was his own self-criticism in the introduction to the 1967 edition. Lukacs' manuscript 'A defence of History and Class Consciousness' lay unknown in the Soviet archives for seventy-five years, with the critical comment 'Destroy maybe? Incomprehensible script from a whinger who does not express his point of view clearly and straightforwardly'.
The nameless archivist's criticism, thankfully, was not the last word, and we have a new essay from the late Lukacs that is surprisingly contemporary. Although the polemics against forgotten figures of 1920s Marxism seem arcane, the ideas that he is defending remain compelling. Against the radicals who, throughout the twentieth century, have tried to de-politicise Marxism, turning it into just another approach to understanding the world, Lukacs insists on the role 'of the subject in the historical process'. While his critics denounce Lukacs for his 'subjectivism', he insists that revolutionary change cannot come without the subjective factor. A postface by Slavoj Zizek, whose book The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology re-raised the question of subjectivity last year is a worthy companion-piece to Lukacs' lost essay.
Georg Lukacs, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness, Verso, London/New York, £16/$23 -- James Heartfield